Blockchain Revolution

The Self-Launched Artist: Signs of the New Music Paradigm
One of Imogen Heap’s friends, Zoë Keating, Canadian-born cellist and composer, has
always controlled her own music. She owns all her publishing rights and the masters
to her recordings. She carefully orchestrates her own marketing, sales, licensing, and
distribution strategy. Given all the complexity mentioned above, we’re hugely
impressed. “An artist like me couldn’t exist without technology. I can just record
music in my basement and release it on the Internet,” Keating told The Guardian. For

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her, the Internet has leveled the playing field for independent artists, but her
experience with the big online music distributors has not differed greatly from Imogen
Heap’s with the traditional labels. “This is not just an excuse for services to replicate
the payment landscapes of the past. It’s not an excuse to take advantage of those
without power,” said Keating. “Corporations do have a responsibility not just to their
shareholders but to the world at large, and to artists.”
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Keating was alluding to the new contract that Google’s YouTube presented to her.
It was wrapped in nondisclosure. For several years, she’s distributed her music on
YouTube and monetized third-party uploads of her material using Content ID, a
program that automatically alerts rights holders to instances of potential copyright
infringement. Keating wasn’t concerned about piracy, file sharing, or royalties. To her,
commercial streaming was a means of promotion, reaching new audiences, and
analyzing usage data. The music aggregators and the hit makers were the ones who
made significant money by offering complete catalogs through on-demand services.
Not her. The largest share of her revenues had always come from hard-core fans
who’d pay from twenty dollars to a hundred for a new album. She would release new
work on Bandcamp first, then upload it to iTunes, and finally make selections
available elsewhere—YouTube, Spotify, Pandora. That windowing strategy—making
content available exclusively in a particular channel for a period of time—had proven
itself effective for her and her hard-core fans. She could thank her existing supporters
and cultivate new relationships.
YouTube was launching a new subscription service, Music Key, where users
would pay a fee to avoid advertising. If Keating wanted to continue monetizing her
work through YouTube, then she would have to agree to YouTube’s terms: include her
entire catalog, and stop windowing elsewhere. It was all or nothing. She knew that the
independent labels weren’t happy either about the new licensing terms, but they were
more upset by the financial repercussions. Keating wanted to maintain control over
her music, on her terms.
She saw the potential of the bitcoin blockchain as a technology that could ensure
that goal, starting with its transparency. “I just believe in transparency in everything,”
she told Forbes. “How can we build a future ecosystem without knowing how the
current one actually works?”
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For example, on YouTube, Keating estimates that there
are fifteen thousand videos—dance performances, films, TV shows, art projects,
gaming sessions—that use her music as soundtracks without her authorization. She
should be able to leverage all that enthusiasm for her work, but only YouTube knows
exactly how popular her music is. Nielsen’s SoundScan is only one facet of a
multidimensional picture.
Like Heap, Keating wants to register copyright and leverage copyright metadata
on the blockchain. That way, people could more easily track her down as the

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copyright holder. She could then track derivative works through the blockchain. A
distributed ledger of music metadata could track not only who created what, but who
else was materially involved. She imagines visualizing usage and relationships,
calculating the real value of a song for dynamic pricing, and enabling ongoing
micropayments to collaborators and investors without third-party black boxes like
ASCAP or BMI.
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Again, we’re not saying that there is no role for labels or technology companies,
and that artists could just make it on their own in a purely peer-to-peer ecosystem.
Rather we’re talking about a new kind of music ecosystem centered on the artists,
where they control their own fate and receive fair compensation for the value they
create. Blockchain technology will not create a new standard for how artists get
compensated. Instead, it will liberate them to choose and customize an infinite array
of solutions that work for their specific needs and beliefs. They can give it away for
free, or micromonetize everything—but it’s their choice, not the label’s or the
distributor’s.